Hello All! Another day at VMworld Europe and more information on what’s new in the VMware ecosystem.  As their recent press release has made obvious, VMware has gone all in with making their ecosystem more developer friendly:  REST-based APIs, Container Support, expanded PowerCLI to name a few.

 

vSphere 6.5

VMware vCenter Server® Appliance – The new vCSA appliance has made many significant improvements.  From the migration path to the ability to now have HA to the new scales of what it can manage.  There are now fewer and fewer reasons to stay with the windows version of vCenter, though there are still some use cases.

REST APIs – gives developers, DevOps, and Operations teams greater flexibility and automation options.

VMware vSphere Client – Goodbye flash-based web client, hello HTML5!, VMware listened to customer feedback and created an interface that is more responsive and (hopefully) more resilient.

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers™ – by getting in on containerized applications in a fashion that is consumable by their existing VMware infrastructure/employees, VMware is making it easier for their infrastructure and development teams to work together more cohesively.

 

VSAN 6.5

iSCSI Support – will enable Virtual SAN storage to be presented as an iSCSI target for external physical workloads including clustered applications such as Microsoft SQL Server with Failover Clustering on a limited number of physical servers.

Containers Support – Virtual SAN will provide persistent data layer for containerized applications via VMware vSphere Integrated Containers.

Two-node Direct Connect – having an option for ROBO sites gives customers more flexibility & options.

Expanded PowerCLI – now that PowerShell is available Linux and Mac, the new PowerCLI integrations will be even more useable.

 

vRealize Automation 7.2

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and container support will give IT and DevOps teams greater flexibility in deploying cross-cloud, multi-tier applications.   In addition, Log Insight 4.0 and vRealize Operations 6.4 were announced and will with all of the aforementioned technologies.

 

In addition, the vBrownBag Tech Talks that I’ve been helping to create have proved to be a great resource of exposure to new technical topics.  We’ve published the VMworld Europe vBrownBag tech talks here.  We recorded 21 videos!  Next week I’ll be doing the OpenStack Summit Tech Talks, so expect many more videos in the coming week!

More to come! In the meantime, register for our upcoming webinar. CTO Chris Ward will be doing a full deep-dive into all of the biggest VMworld announcements.

Chris Williams – GreenPages Enterprise Consultant

 

Hello all,

There have been a lot of great announcements coming out of VMworld EU this week.  Here are the exciting items that have been announced so far:

vSphere 6.5 vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)

A lot of great changes have happened to the vCSA over the past few years.  It can now run significantly more hosts/vms.  There are less steps involved in spinning it up as opposed to the Windows version.  And NOW (finally!) one of the last reasons for keeping the windows version around has been addressed:  vUM!  VCSA 6.5 now has Update Manager integrated.  You can now upgrade from 5.5 or 6.0 (windows OR appliance) to 6.5, including vDS configuration.  It has a brand new HTML5 web client, though it doesn’t yet have feature parity with the old version, that will be addressed.

VMware Cross-Cloud services

This is the thing that I’m the most excited about and the one that has me asking “What took you so long?”.  Cross-cloud services will enable connectivity to public cloud providers for the “seamless integration of workloads”.  It will enable you to (for example) run your DB on premises, your application tier in AWS, and your web front end in Azure.  I asked some of the AWS guys here about the technical details but they haven’t been ironed out quite yet.  This offering is slated to be available “Mid 2017” and will be purported to also have “Elastic DRS” – an ecosystem that allows you to burst across clouds.  In the event of a workload spike, you would be able to provision more VMs locally via vRA and use Auto-Scale Groups to increase the number of EC2 instances in AWS to handle the increased demand.  VMware also announced that NSX micro-segmentation would also function within the public cloud providers – this will give you additional security granularity on top of native firewalls, security groups and network access  control lists.

 

More to come! In the meantime, register for our upcoming webinar. CTO Chris Ward will be doing a full deep-dive into all of the biggest VMworld announcements.

Chris Williams – GreenPages Enterprise Consultant